Did Life ever Begin?

[Adrenaline Junkie]

Many people refer to life as something that just happens, we become alive, you are born and you are alive. Trace it back and you will see that we do not simply become alive, we are alive constantly, that small sperm cell within my father may have been created through reproduction, but before that i was not born, i simply developed constantly, this all began from the beginning of any form. We all did, were all in the same boat, everything around us that reproduces or is living is technically part of us. The only difference is that they branched out a little earlier than we did. This could divert to a topic about evolution, but that is not the direction i want this conversation to go. Read on. You could say i have been 30-40 years in the making, but if you think about it carefully, it goes back much further than that, you could link it further and further back. I am not a creation that was simply born into this world, i never just started living 17 years ago, i was growing and reproducing in the simplest of forms. These 17 years i have developed into this human being with a consciousness and more. Death is the one thing that can truly define our end, the one way of passing on ourselves and preserving what is left of ourselves is reproduction. Developing a newborn from that that has grown within us. Of course there will always be a part of me that lives on, after all, i am a leaf from the same tree that many others sprout from. So technically you could say that i never became alive, i have always been alive, just like you, we all started off together, but as we became more complex, we were able to independently branch off. In fact, you can only say that something is living when you are conscious that you yourself are living, self awareness and all. But where do you draw the line in saying what is living and what does not. So my question is, what is living? We all originated from one thing which never really had a beginning, it was always linked somehow to a simpler form which was maybe not as developed. Is it not silly to say that we simply started living, we were given life. Because at the end of the day, we have always been living, we have just grown apart over the constant time we have been living. Another question i must bring out is this. Is death not the end? I am not talking about spiritual stuff or an afterlife and all that. What i am talking about is that we never really die theoretically. We are all species that have branched out and reproduced. But when we die, we don't die fully, because there are still aspects of us that live on in others, for example if i had a child, that would be me in a sense though the part of me you all know now would be dead. Cells split, we reproduce, no matter what, there is always something passed on that is ours, for example DNA. Of course, broken down, there must have originally been a cell which was responsible for a lot of what has developed today, it maybe could have been multiple cells. Of course you can break that cell down into a simpler form if you go further back, you can trace it to proteins, chemicals and more, of course the list goes on and we cannot truly say how far it goes, we can only set markers an work from there, for example the atom. But maybe it is just infinite. Of course there are paradoxes, because what if every living cell were to die right now, we would not technically be infinite. Death is something that is a big complication in this whole argument and balance. What are your thoughts? (I am aware that this may make no sense at all, but please let me know and i'll try and explain a bit clearer) EDIT - There were some clear contradictions which i had to correct myself on, but please let me know if you see anymore, i may be completely wrong all together about thinking this, but it would be cool to talk about it, if i am wrong it would be great to learn more about the overall topic.